The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  If God had taken away her husband and failed to give her a rich, constant new lover, at least He’d provided her with a son she could engulf entirely. With this son—her hobby, her lapdog, her portable altar—she could enter into a soothing trance induced by exchanged compliments. He was a genius, sensitive, kind, insightful; and she was a hard-working, dedicated humanitarian making a great contribution to science and the community.

  We weren’t alike. No, she told me, I was a dreamer, poetic, like her father Jim, an Irishman who’d died young. I would never be able to handle money, drive a car, land a job, according to her mythology. That’s where she came in. She was the practical one and I was dependent on her. All that was obvious from the psychological tests she gave me—my high score on the verbal part of the Stanford-Binet, my mediocre one on the Wechsler, which was oriented toward problem-solution.

  Although O’Reilly, the psychiatrist I’d had as an adolescent, was an amphetamine-popping, booze-swilling crackpot, constantly dozing off during my hours when he wasn’t picking at a scab on his nose and murmuring how much he loved me (avoiding my name, which often eluded him), nevertheless his one big theory about human neuroses blamed Mom, and he’d drilled me in it until I broke my dependence on her. When I was seventeen and eighteen I’d heaped abuse on her, accusing her of having turned me into a homosexual, attacking her for spoiling my childhood by forcing me to play her husband. Even her habit of calling me a “genius” had made it impossible for me to fail at things, to experiment, to grope. If I’d learned to drive, to work, to manage my money it had been in defiance of her behavior-shaping and her pseudo-scientific test results.

  Her eyes would fill with tears and her mouth would tremble as I shouted at her, but more from the anger in my voice than from the power of my argument. She was always very sure she was right. Each time after I challenged her she’d begin chanting to herself a mantra of self-justification as she turned a prayer-wheel of self-praise.

  Once I moved to New York weeks would go by without my calling or writing her, but when we were in contact everything was calm and kindly. I developed a new tactic for dealing with her, a sort of Confucian filial piety. I decided to be scrupulously respectful of her, patient, attentive, laudatory. I never told her anything about myself and with some bitterness I noticed that she seldom asked me questions. The summer before going to Rome (1969—the summer of Stonewall) I’d joined her for a week in what she called her “summer cottage,” although it was a sordid suburban house in a small Michigan town an hour north of Chicago.

  After three days my Confucian filial piety eroded away and I became irritable again. My anger as a teenager had been inflamed by my psychiatrist, just as my later piety was more a pose than a conviction: since all my friends routinely treated their parents with hostility (“Never trust anyone over thirty” was their slogan), when I turned thirty I decided to treat my mother with elaborate deference—an aesthetic, not an ethical decision. The only genuine, unmediated way to deal with her I’d ever known had been the rapt devotion of my childhood, expressed by that cry I’d shouted, “If you die I’ll throw myself in the grave with you.”

  Even back then, when I was a child, I’d occasionally rebelled against my desire to curl up beside her and deal out reciprocal praise, but these episodes were brief. Otherwise I was so satisfied with her that I never sought out friends; I didn’t even know that people had friends other than their acquaintances in the classroom. Like a somnambulist I sleepwalked from bed to school, school to library, and there I’d slumped on the floor in the open stacks and so entirely forgotten time, and even my own existence except as an eye moving over print, that night would fall and the dinner hour creep by before the closing bell and dimming lights would shake me out of my stupor. Later, when I was fourteen and fifteen, I tasted the apple of friendship and was driven out of the paradisal garden of maternal love; once out, I never again had the self-forgetfulness necessary for the sort of reading in which the page becomes a layer of the cortex, its letters struck directly onto the neurons.

  When I was ten I looked at my thirteen-year-old sister and shocked my mother by saying, “The poor girl has already become sexual and I guess she’ll go on that way for a very long time. As for myself, I feel I’m on a hilltop looking down at a wide valley that I’ll have to cross.” The valley of desire, I was sure, would make me much less intelligent. I even wrote an essay arguing that children should be given the vote since they alone were objective, swayed neither by the looks of the candidates nor influenced by their own economic interests in evaluating the issues. They were without desire and without possessions.

  I’m the sort of person who still turns off the television when the movie becomes too frightening or even tense; even then, I couldn’t bear the high drama of seeing my mother ill or dying, as she might be dying now from breast cancer. I’m the sort of person who can lick a stranger’s boots in a backroom, then come home, turn on all the lights, make coffee, take a thirty-minute shower, listen to The Well-Tempered Clavier, if someone touches my shoulder tenderly I jump and glower; I couldn’t bear to look at my mother’s bleeding, excised flesh because I could tolerate neither intimacy nor the sight of pain.

  With my long hair, dirty jeans, buccaneer’s shirt, and my clothes and fingers smelling of cigarettes, I felt unwelcome in my mother’s apartment building on the Near North Side, although George the doorman (the same grinning sneak who’d tattled to my mother about my teenage affair with Lou) welcomed me with oily enthusiasm and asked me how she was doing, his face bent down in a conventional glyph of silence while his little eyes darted from the street (to see if a taxi was approaching) to the security screen above his station, which revealed that someone ominous was trying to enter the building by the alley door.

  I was still angry with my mother for dragging me back to Chicago and I was muttering harsh words against her when I let myself into her apartment. The silence that greeted me was spooky, the silence of ducts feeding the exact degree of warmed air into the room. Everything was impeccable. She must have done a thorough cleaning in anticipation of my visit and her convalescence—her death, possibly Here were the knick-knacks I’d played with as a child, the two Chinese figurines in symmetrical niches flanking the breakfront, the glass bird through whose transparent brain I’d studied the world for idle hours, the glazed oxblood vase always cool to the touch, even on the most stifling summer days.

  My mother was so formidable that it was hard to remember she was just five feet tall until I looked at her dresses hanging on white satin hangers all in a row. She was a tiny dowager empress and here were her beaded and brocaded gowns, her mink, her hats on higher shelves that she needed a ladder to reach. The wall-to-wall carpet was white and thick; I pictured her snow-sledding through it in her stocking feet. There, in an armchair too large for her, she’d sit, legs dangling in the air, glasses perched on her nose, sewing something. Although she prided herself on being a professional woman, she possessed all the traditional feminine skills and could cook a succulent pot roast, crochet, polish silver until it emitted a high C, bake a cake from scratch. I can still remember the bitter chocolate she swirled into a batter of egg yolks, marbling, then blending the two, slow-pouring colors.

  Over the dining room table was a chandelier I’d sent her from Rome. On the side table were black-and-white photos of my father, then of my sister and me as well as color pictures of my sister’s three children. The family’s decline in fortunes was obvious: my father impeccably groomed in a tailor-made suit, starched white handkerchief cresting in three stiff peaks out of his vest pocket, an affable chief executive’s smile promising bonhomie and intelligence but no warmth; my sister’s white-blonde hair drawn away from her face when she was just eight and still resembled a Princess Imperial; a recent snap of me stronger in mood than lighting by an arty Village lesbian who portrayed me as a backlit terrorist, eyes two anarchistic holes above the wispy surrender of a mustache; and my sister’s three kids, two boys and a girl, all decked ou
t in J.C. Penney plaids and denim, their freckles and big-toothed smiles also ordered from a mail-order catalog. At a time when most American families were climbing the ladder we were clearly descending it.

  In the bookcase were the same old volumes Mother had had when I was a baby (Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and Key to the Scriptures, The Victor Book of the Opera, Ben Hur), as well as more recent acquisitions (“cute” books about being a besotted grandmother or about the darndest things kids are likely to say). In fact most of the newer objects in the apartment were cute gift items—magnetic cartoon characters adhering to the fridge, “Granny’s” cookie box painted with a smiling old lady in an apron and glasses, a porcelain cow that poured milk from its mouth—but I dimly recognized that they were the sort of novelties nice women with droll tastes bought for themselves on trips or exchanged with other ladies, not to be confused with the still cruder kitsch poorer people picked up at filling stations with Green Stamps. But I was no one to make such observations, I who’d never owned a car, pumped my own gas, listened to pop music, visited a shopping mall, possessed a television or played miniature golf. I saw that New York was a sort of monastery where people gave up comfort and mindless distractions for the austere but thrilling excitement of making art, meeting eccentrics and enjoying constant sex.

  I slept in my mother’s bed, which was so difficult to make up in the morning or prepare at night that often she preferred to sleep on the couch. A decorator had designed the bed with a wrinkleless, quilted cover rigidly outlined in dark cotton piping that was supposed to be pulled down over the mattress and that fitted a rounded cardboard bolster nailed onto a wooden frame; the pillows were squeezed up inside the bolster and then “accent” pillows in contrasting shades were scattered over the entire dressed bed like rose petals over a costumed corpse. The same decorator had installed matching curtains, so heavy they could scarcely be opened, but I pulled them to look out at the glowing city below and the beach a block away. I tried to imagine my mother living here, making and unmaking her state bed, painting her toenails, pouring milk into her coffee out of her droll porcelain cow, preparing her microscopic suppers out of the groceries she’d picked up a block away at Stop n’ Shop, curling up in her nightgown to watch 60 Minutes (she swore she never looked at mere comedy or variety shows, and indeed she preferred routine to variety and had no sense of humor).

  As I smoked my cigarettes and polluted her lightly perfumed Fabergé egg of an apartment I both longed for her death and feared it. Without her I’d have no more ties to my family; I no longer spoke to my father. I’d be entirely self-sufficient, as solitary as I already felt I was. In fact her death would simply mean that the scaffolding would fall away, revealing at last the gigantic Statue of Solitude I’d been working on becoming. Without her the suspense of waiting for her death would be over. Did I want her to die because I longed for something, anything, to happen? In my poverty and impotence, my frustration at not being able to coerce someone into publishing me, did I expect the banal inescapable drama of loss and death to transform me? Sometimes I marveled at how my Texas relatives could pick over one another’s woes, keen and mourn, but now I saw that theirs were the unearned tragedies, those that befall everyone. My old uncles and aunts weren’t being punished for daring, hands bound to a rock for stealing fire; no, these were just bored, retired people whom custom had long ago prepared for hospitals and funerals. They were almost glad that at last they could say the lines they’d so often rehearsed. Or so I imagined.

  Was I glad my mother was sick?

  Not at all. I was indignant. I was like a debutante called back from the ball by her father’s heart attack. I wanted to cover my face with a heavy black veil so no one would see it was flushed with petty vexation. The sort of excitement New York offered, fueled by celebrity, money and sex, could never come to an end precisely because these three rewards were unobtainable. One could never have enough of them and what one had was never a fixed sum. To be called away from New York was like forcing a broker to leave his phone and computer. Just as buying and selling were hypnotic activities, writing, cruising and social climbing were every bit as randomly reinforced and gripping.

  When I was a young teenage boy I’d been invited by the lifeguard, Forrest Greene, into his tower, the changing room inside the wooden frame that narrowed as it rose and that held high his chair for surveying the swimmers in Lake Michigan. It had begun to rain and the beach was deserted and even Forrest’s girlfriend had finally gone home and here at last I was with him, just an inch separating us as we stood facing each other in our swimsuits. There was already a swelling in the green pouch of his white-sided Speedo swimsuit. I had just to raise my hand to touch his chest, hard and sun-baked as a clay tablet superscribed in cursive gold hairs, a cuneiform of ringlets, commas and dashes I knew I must touch in order to decipher—but just then there was a loud banging, and Forrest unlatched the door to reveal my mother standing, hooded, in the downpour. She dragged me home to our apartment just across the street. She’d obviously been spying on us from the window. She’d saved me from the fate of being held by Forrest’s big, sun-baked body. She’d saved me from having my lips smeared with his white sun-protecting liquid, which he’d also streaked down his nose and over his cheekbones like an Apache. Just as she was saving me now from another night in the trucks.

  Funny. At the time it would never have occurred to me I was addicted. I didn’t imagine for an instant that I was a prisoner to sex. No, I was free. After those years of my mother’s vigilance, after my boarding school, where the halls had been patrolled all night and we’d slept in chaste, separate rooms, at last I was free—free to go out every night, all night, to respond to every glance, to shower between tricks before plunging back to the docks or the trucks.

  ———

  MY SISTER came by for dinner. We went to a neighborhood place she loved where the all-women staff baked their own bread and the recorded music was played by a bluegrass band. She was a big Midwestern woman with her blue plastic glasses frames, wide stance and worn-down heels, leatherette handbag and loud, nasal voice, but in an instant I was leaning forward, trying to please her. She seemed more vulnerable but also more erratic than I’d ever seen her.

  Yet she was a star, always would be. When we were teenagers she’d been captain of the Blues at summer camp and had won gold stars in fencing and was always surrounded by her court of adoring girls wearing braces, their chubby, sun-browned bodies in uniforms of shorts and pressed cotton monogrammed shirts with cuffed short sleeves. She stood among and somehow above them, her jaw strong, her cap of blonde hair bleached almost white, her arms muscled, as though her will alone had burned off the baby fat and given her legs a lean, male strength.

  In September her estival plumage would molt and she’d go back to being a little brown wren at high school in long, pleated skirts, thick white socks and lead-soled saddle shoes, a frightened girl who hugged her school books to her breasts as she darted, head down, from one class to another. Later, in her small Ohio college where our father had forbidden her to study pre-med and had made her take up primary education, she’d become a Theta and eventually the president of her sorority, firm and confident in glee club concerts or all-girl basketball games, though paralyzed with fear when forced to attend sock-hops. She married Dick, the first man who asked her, virtually the first man she ever dated.

  Like her, Dick was training to be a teacher (“a school teacher,” as my Texas father said with the faint innuendo of the shabby one-room school-house). He was from a poor family living on the outskirts of a big Ohio city and was paying for his education by working summer jobs in construction and by taking out huge student loans. He had a permanently red beak for a nose and a face that never changed expressions away from an innocuous half-smile and eyes so shallow and fixed they looked painted on. His shoulders were bunched around his ears but instead of indicating tension they made him look merely beleaguered—if not decapitated, despite the constant chuckle filte
ring out of his mouth as if on a tape loop. No matter what we said (and in our family my sister, my mother and I never stopped talking or shifting from one register to another), Dick just laughed his little chuckle, originally intended to suggest merriment before it wound down and got softer. An Englishman, I was sure, would have found him more stylized than a Kabuki dancer, so exotic was he, but in America he counted as a “good guy.” People might have said, “C’mon, you guys, lay off Dick, he’s harmless. He may be a little nerdy but he’s basically a good guy.”

  Dick wore plaid shorts and outsize button-down dress shirts, hanging out and rumpled right from the dryer. He treated everything—from wearing clothes to entering the room to breathing—as a kind of nerdy joke, which squeezed a bit of laughter out of him as though the organ grinder were turning the handle of his hurdy-gurdy one more desultory time.

  But he liked me and because of him my sister came to see me in a new light. She’d always regarded me as nothing but a curse, a blatant sign that she’d never really be popular, a weirdo who proved that her own efforts to be normal were doomed. When she brought Dick home she posed my mother in an armchair with needle and thread and me before the television watching a boxing match, but as soon as we spoke, of course, all was lost. Or gained, since in spite of his idiotic laugh, which afflicted him as a low-grade fever indicates a constant but not fatal illness, Dick was an intellectual. I couldn’t talk about his subjects, politics or sociology or John Dewey’s educational theories, but at least I’d read a few books and heard of the thinkers whom he was studying. My sister was amazed by our compatibility, which raised me, not him, in her eyes; Dick was already at the summit of her esteem. My sister’s new-found affection for me seemed false at first and I kept fearing it was just the bait in the trap. She was acting a kindly role but in her eyes burned the same old contempt.